Risks of Space Worth It, Some at Caltech Say
Long before the Columbia disaster, David Anderson knew just how dangerous any space shuttle mission could be. The Caltech research scientist specializes in fractured mechanics, the study of how metals and other materials rupture under stress, a science of failure.
“It’s a roll of the dice,” he said of shuttle travel.
And one he would gladly risk. Without hesitation. “I’d go up on the shuttle tomorrow,” said Anderson, who works in the aeronautics department.
The Columbia tragedy hit hard at Caltech, cradle of much of the science that made the space program possible. Folks like Anderson speak of the seven dead astronauts as if they were family. They feel a deep kinship with all of NASA, the Pasadena university’s partner in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Mostly, though, the researchers, teachers and students worry that the Columbia’s disintegration will weaken public and government support for the scientific risk-taking that is Caltech’s hallmark. They fear that many people will never understand that failure will always be part of the bargain in space exploration.
“We do understand that,” said Anderson, 31, as he tinkered in his basement laboratory, examining a compressed-gas gun. “We’re certainly saddened by the Columbia, but in a sense we’re not surprised. The shuttle is a very complex system.... But the rewards are so tremendous.”
He and his colleagues now see those rewards as threatened. “This is much more dire than the Challenger explosion,” Anderson said. “This could be the death knell of manned space research.”
Across campus at the material sciences department, graduate student Greg Welsh paused from his work on metallic glass, which may one day be used on a spacecraft. “NASA must be hurting,” he said. “How is this going to hurt its programs? How is it going to affect the popular opinion of science?”
Welsh, 23, said his second reaction to the loss of the Columbia, after a combination of shock and grief, was a yearning for answers. “To a material scientist, it’s a very interesting problem,” he said. “I’d like to get in there and see what happened.”
And given the chance, he also would line up for the next shuttle flight. “I wouldn’t be afraid,” he said. “It would be fun. The risk is where the fun comes from.”
Welsh is a student of William Johnson, a professor who was involved, from the ground, in experiments on three Columbia missions. Several tested liquid metal alloys that could make spacecraft more resistant to heat.
“It’s personal,” Johnson, 54, said of the Columbia’s demise. “It’s shocking. I looked at the debris flying over Texas and thought, ‘How could that ever happen?’ We’ve never seen a failure like that in space flight.”
But perhaps it was inevitable, he said. “Nobody has it all figured out,” Johnson added. His face clouded as he glanced at a white board filled with a blizzard of equations on alloys and heat -- the sort of super heat that the Columbia encountered.
“The aftermath looks pretty grim,” he said. “Our experiments are going to be pushed back five years.”
Over the decades, Caltech’s research has made a wealth of contributions to the fundamental sciences behind space flight. The work of five current and former faculty members was directly employed in the shuttle’s design. The school also has produced two astronauts, Harrison Schmitt and Edward Gibson.
JPL focuses on robotic craft, such as the Mars probes. It developed systems for the first U.S. space mission, the Explorer I satellite in 1958.
Many of JPL’s subsequent ventures ended in failure -- Explorer launches, numerous moon probes and others. Each had begun with a can-do expectation of success, just like the final Columbia voyage.
“It’s a very sad thing,” said Paul Dimotakis, a Caltech professor of aeronautics and applied physics. He had studied the shuttle’s thermal tiles before the program’s inaugural mission in 1981, and found that they could be vulnerable on liftoff to shock waves. NASA took corrective action as a result.
NASA is investigating whether the Columbia’s tiles were damaged by a chunk of fuel tank insulation shortly after liftoff, or if the shuttle was struck by space debris.”It makes clear that this is a very dangerous undertaking,” Dimotakis said. “Despite our best efforts ... the margin of error is so small.”
Hans Hornung, the director of Caltech’s Graduate Aeronautics Laboratory, is devoted to those margins. “We’re always battling to fight heating,” he said.
He held up a hunk of molybdenum -- a dense metal -- that had been cracked and partly melted in Caltech’s shock tunnel, a series of steel cylinders as long as a warehouse floor. “This is a bad thing,” Hornung said of the broken specimen in his hand.
He thinks NASA should invest in a next-generation shuttle, but wonders if the Columbia setback will curtail spending.
“We might have to make do with the shuttle,” he said.
That’s fine with two of his students, Christopher Mouton and Nicolas Ponchaut, who say they’d climb aboard the shuttle any time.
“I don’t know if my family would be thrilled, but I would go,” said Mouton, 23.
“Definitely,” said Ponchaut, 25. “It would be the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s something that everyone here dreams about.”
